What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed? [video] | Hacker News Reader

What if you threw a baseball at nearly light speed? [video]

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He published a correction in the hardcover WhatIf that the "fusion zone" at the front of the baseball would not actually form, as the collisions are too fast for fusion to take place. Instead, the protons would "ghost" through each other, resulting in some awesome energies and exotic radiation. Unfortunately, I can't find the underlying science behind this. Anyone know where that could be found, assuming it's still correct?

I wonder if it would essentially be the types of proton-proton collisions that happen in the LHC, just at an extremely more massive scale.

Dang, and seemed like such a neat idea, too.

The good news is that not only can I throw a ball at nearly the speed of light, I can run away from it even faster. And the guy at bat is on the other team. But I would rather not fry my teammates.

Would that not mean that you create another fusion/blast/shockwave right next to the other one, disintegrate yourself, make your wave clash with ball wave and just make the whole area a larger, more chaotic, burning whole in the ground?

Wow. I just had a conversation about this with my son. He wanted to play a super hero run around the world 3 times in a second. Being a no-fun-dad I tried to explain why this is a bad idea. "The atmosphere will be like a stone wall. When you collide with it all kinds of exciting things will happen".

I will have to show him this.

The first ever What If, that made it a hit (in more than a sense). 0.9c is not fast enough to make a really big difference in mass or time for the ball, but its speed alone is bad news in something like a dense enough atmosphere.

That escalated…quickly

0.9c is great but would there be a big difference at say 0.9999c?

Yeah, there's a huge difference!

At relativistic speeds (AKA speeds you can express as a significant percentage of the speed of light) energy increases exponentially as you get closer to c.

Put another way - since the energy of an object is infinite at the speed of light, then the energy needs to keep getting bigger and bigger as you keep putting 9s on the end, since if you're going .9c your energy is not infinite, while if you are going .(9)c your energy is infinite.

To actually answer your question, the energy of an object going at .9999c would be about 50x the energy of an object going at .9c.

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